Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun.
Just so, semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning are, pretty clearly, different sorts of theories. The term âtheory of meaningâ has, in the recent history of philosophy, been used to stand for both semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning.
Semantic theory. For the second-language learner, the acquisition of meaning is arguably the most important task. Meaning it is the heart of a language, not the exotic sounds or elegant sentence structure. There are several types of meanings: lexical, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic.